In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  By the end of the flight, a theory of what had happened had formed in my mind, but it was only after meeting the colonel again that its features would be confirmed.

  * * *

  It’s a pleasure to see you again, my boy. How are you?

  Good afternoon, Colonel.

  The colonel was there at Islamabad airport. During the flight, I’d plugged Suleiman’s flash drive into my laptop and discovered, as I expected, that it was blank.

  I trust the flight was agreeable, he said.

  Fine. Those envelopes. They didn’t contain money, did they? I asked him right away.

  Correct.

  Military plans?

  Close.

  Bogus plans intended to draw Taliban action somewhere specific. You’re going to set a trap, I said.

  Well done, responded the colonel, as if awarding marks in an exam.

  Suleiman works for the Taliban? I asked.

  For the opposition.

  How did you come to know Suleiman was working for this opposition?

  Suleiman worked for us. He believed we had no knowledge of where his true allegiances lay. The question is, how did you know Suleiman was working for the opposition?

  The colonel hadn’t answered my question: too much information to share.

  I didn’t know for sure, I replied. But because he would have sent me to Café Europa, I suspected he wasn’t everything he seemed. He also gave me what he wanted me to believe was a recording of Crane incriminating himself, but it was blank. And then there’s the fact that he didn’t show up this morning. In the wind, I imagine. What exactly did your message to Emily say?

  The colonel did not bat an eyelid. On the flight, I had come to the suspicion that he had had a message sent to Emily, which in turn prompted her to contact me and tell me to wait for her. He seemed not the least surprised by my question, and I had the impression he was ready to say whatever he was able to say.

  Simply that you were in Kabul, replied the colonel, and getting on a flight in one hour.

  Why didn’t you just leave a message for me at AfDARI but in Emily’s name?

  Because she might have learned by other means that you were already in Kabul and left you her own message. Then there would be two messages, potentially inconsistent ones.

  What if she hadn’t contacted me right away? Or what if she had and I still decided not to wait for her but went to Café Europa instead?

  There were other ways to keep you away. You received the message held for you at the gate, did you not?

  That was from you?

  From us.

  Of course, I said. I remembered my exchange with the gatekeeper at AfDARI. Suaif had not actually said that the message was from Suleiman. I had been asking him about Suleiman and Suaif had been talking about a message that said my meeting was delayed. Between my agitation at having again to wait for Emily and Suaif’s erratic command of English, I had only assumed that the message had come from Suaif. Why didn’t you have the message sent to me right away? I asked. Why have it held at the gate?

  The message from Emily was the wicketkeeper; the one at the gate was a long stop.

  You left the long stop, as you call it, waiting at the gate because if you’d had the message brought directly to me, I might have contacted Crane to postpone or cancel, in which case Crane might not have gone to Café Europa. Is that right?

  You would have been kept away in any event, replied the colonel.

  I don’t know if I’m appalled or touched, I said. Tell me: Is Crane alive?

  Regrettably not.

  But you could have stopped that?

  The colonel didn’t answer. There was an obvious question: Why had the colonel wanted Crane to go to Café Europa? It was obviously also a question the colonel would not answer.

  Was Crane really a pedophile?

  That’s what Suleiman told you?

  In graphic detail.

  Why do you doubt it?

  Because when I suggested to Crane that someone had evidence of his pedophilia, he didn’t seem interested. He must have known that there couldn’t be any such evidence. Yet, curiously, he didn’t react to the very idea that he was being accused of pedophilia.

  What does that tell you? asked the colonel.

  The colonel’s Socratic method reinforced the idea that I already had much of the information in my possession and needed only to piece it together. Everything I knew about Crane’s venality I had learned from Suleiman. This is not mathematics, in which content stands and falls by itself, but the world, in which authority and motive matter. Yet some claims are so horrific, so unrelentingly repulsive, we seem unable to stop and think whether the claims are true. The merest suggestion can destroy a career, a life. And if we cannot think about whether they are true, how can we think about them at all, when they are?

  Surely you know? I asked the colonel.

  Old soldiers have a tendency toward arrogance, not omniscience. Tell me what you think, and, if I can, I’ll set you straight.

  Crane actually did give Suleiman the impression that he was a pedophile. But it was just a fabrication to get Suleiman to hate him so that he would be only too eager to steal those documents that were being mysteriously sent to him. The ISAF jeep delivering them only enhanced the idea that the papers contained military plans. As for Maurice, he was unimportant, a bit player simply handing on parcels from time to time, without any knowledge.

  So far so good.

  What’s not clear is who this opposition is that Suleiman was working for. Aside from Suleiman’s role in Crane’s death, there’s no evidence that Suleiman was actually working for the insurgents rather than the Americans.

  Why would the Americans want Crane dead? the colonel asked.

  I’m not ruling out that there might be some reason I don’t know, I said.

  Suleiman was working for the insurgents and Crane for the Americans, explained the colonel.

  Why kill Crane, though? I don’t mean he didn’t have a motive; he thought Crane was a nasty piece of work. But it’s a lot of trouble to go to, mounting a bomb attack in Kabul with ISAF all over the city.

  My belief is that he was most likely targeting you. He got Crane into the bargain for free.

  Not the other way?

  Possibly, but in the final analysis I do not think much turns on it.

  Why would he want me dead?

  Suleiman?

  He didn’t stop me from going to Café Europa. You did.

  It’s rather reassuring, in fact, that he wanted you dead. It confirms that he believes he has acquired valuable intelligence. Killing you would have prevented you from informing someone of what happened.

  But I’m not dead. He must know that.

  Maybe, maybe not. But who would you tell? Suleiman is not stupid. He knows you couldn’t tell anyone without attracting suspicion, if, that is, you managed not to incriminate yourself. How would you explain that you knew Suleiman had acquired the documents? Killing you would have been neater, but it would not have added much.

  I could tell you. Doesn’t he know that?

  He’s not worried about you telling me. That’s fine, because he thinks we wanted him to acquire the documents.

  And he is right about that.

  Yes. But he doesn’t know that we’re working with the Americans on this, at least as of one hour from now. The Americans had been trying for a month to set this trap, but Suleiman had neither the balls nor the ingenuity to copy the documents unnoticed. In fairness to them, if they’d made it too easy for him, it would have aroused his suspicions.

  And Crane was part of all that.

  We decided to step in—

  Without telling the Americans?

  They will know soon enough.

  And Crane didn’t know the Pakistanis were involved.

  You say Pakistanis, but really it was a more limited operation.

  And Crane wasn’t in on that.

  No.

  Won’t the Americans want to
know why you didn’t tip them off before Crane was killed?

  My dear boy. The only way we learned anything was when a confidential informant, whose identity cannot be disclosed, came to me and told me, and it was too late for Crane then. But the Americans don’t even need to know that.

  What informant?

  The colonel smiled. He was referring to me.

  Did Crane seem like a monster to you? asked the colonel.

  Yes and no.

  The trouble with Crane, said the colonel, is that he was unable to fully inhabit a new persona—as you’ve just demonstrated. No, our boy Crane is a casualty of war.

  Why did you not step in and save Crane?

  When you play chess, does it matter whether you were black or white in a previous game? In one game, you are white, in another black.

  You believe you need to stay onside with the Americans.

  You can be more precise than that.

  You, Colonel Mushtaq, retired, want the Americans to believe that you are onside with them. But you, Colonel Mushtaq, also want to see the war end as soon as possible. How is that for precision?

  Good enough.

  If the object of the exercise was to pique Suleiman’s interest in the documents, why was Crane supposed to maintain the impression he might be a pedophile?

  So that Suleiman would have a grudge against him. Politics and religion will motivate the mass, but if you want one man to act, then personal animus is so much more reliable. We needed Suleiman to risk getting at the contents of the envelope.

  But that grudge went further than you expected?

  The colonel frowned but didn’t respond.

  The jeep was later than usual that day, I said.

  Yes. That was a difficult decision. You see, if we didn’t deliver that day, albeit a little later, we couldn’t be sure you’d stay in Kabul long enough for the next drop-off.

  But it could raise suspicions. It was always on time.

  Possibly. But Suleiman went ahead, didn’t he? And after all that trouble, and the fact that he can’t come back, he’s now invested in the idea that the loot is worth something. He himself will be the best advocate for the reliability of those plans.

  How did you know it had all played out as you expected?

  The torn envelope.

  I didn’t imagine the colonel had actually seen the envelope but had heard about it. I thought of Crane. What was it Crane had said when, before we parted, I declined his invitation to watch American football with him? Not your cup of tea, eh? I don’t know if he’d made a conscious connection and I can’t imagine why he’d want to hint anything to me, but still I wondered now if Crane had noticed that Suleiman’s promised tea never materialized.

  Suleiman said he wanted me to become the director at AfDARI, I said to the colonel.

  He seemed to be waiting for me to finish.

  He said the trustees also wanted to see a change at the top. What was that for?

  What do you think?

  Flattery?

  Perhaps, although I’m not sure you present yourself as someone easily flattered. I rather think the purpose was somewhat more subtle. It was misdirection. He was intimating that he himself was anchored to AfDARI, to Kabul, and to the life he was ostensibly leading. He wanted you to take his frame of reference as the narrow one of careerism.

  Sounds plausible.

  The colonel was looking at me as if considering whether to tell me something.

  That evening, said the colonel, after you had dinner with us, the general asked me if I was trying to flatter you with the attention of such top brass.

  What did you say?

  I didn’t say anything. Why should I? Of course, if flattery worked, then so be it. But I was counting on something else. You have a character trait you must watch out for. I know because I used to have it. If you can rein it in, you’d be very effective indeed.

  The colonel paused there, waiting for me to ask.

  And what would that be?

  You’re not a trusting fellow, but you very much want to trust, and in the right conditions you will do so.

  What conditions are those?

  When you believe you are taking principled action.

  * * *

  The outside concourse was in the shade, but there was sunlight beyond, over the cars and buses. Islamabad already felt quite removed and the world far away—a feeling that I knew was quite false, but I hadn’t the stomach to deny even an illusory sense of relief.

  So what now? I asked the colonel.

  Now I have to ask you to spend three weeks as my guest, he replied.

  Only three?

  Thank you, my boy. It will truly be my pleasure.

  But in three weeks there will be interesting news. The Taliban ambushed somewhere?

  Come now, said the colonel, brushing off my question. There will be time for such a word. You do know that you will be safe?

  You could have let me go to the café.

  Precisely. I really do enjoy your company, you know.

  And it’s so hard to get good help these days, I said.

  Quite so.

  We climbed into the Land Cruiser.

  I think we’ll have a bite to eat and play chess.

  In the corner? I asked.

  In the corner.

  You have me cornered.

  Only literally, my boy.

  * * *

  What I never broached with the colonel, of course, was how he’d known what was going to happen at Café Europa. For his part, the colonel had the good grace never to ask me anything about Emily, and I wondered how much he already knew.

  * * *

  I must tell you the truth, Zafar would come to say, in a phrase whose weight is borne by the word truth, a word that seems to claim the whole of a sentence wherever it appears. Truth is the thing that’s sought, is it not? Remember Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which tells us truth is not there always to be found and that we cannot know ahead of the search whether the truth itself is of a kind that can be uncovered. Little wonder, then, that when it is truth that is promised, our ears will prick up, as did mine. Yet as I write now, reflecting again on that phrase after the passage of time, I find myself thinking not of truth but of must. I have read somewhere that we should look to our second thoughts for the deepest wisdom. As I now read Zafar’s phrase, I hear a different stress. Why does a man feel he must speak?

  I read Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when I was at Eton. Part of the English literary canon, it is the kind of poem that is precisely within the writ of a decent English education. I remember the English master, Mr. Humphries, asking us to consider the premise of the poem. A young mariner collars a fellow on his way to a wedding. Against his initial protest, the wedding guest is forced to hear the young mariner’s story. Humphries, I recall, was so vexed by the mariner’s compulsion to tell his story to someone that to the boys in the classroom his interest verged, I think, on the comical. The room failed to take up the question of why the compulsion, so that Humphries, resorting to random selection, singled out me.

  It’s made up, isn’t it, sir? It doesn’t really matter.

  The poem doesn’t matter?

  No, sir. It’s not really important, the compulsion you talk about. It’s just a way to get the story out.

  But doesn’t that beg the question?

  Sorry, sir?

  Why does he feel he has to get the story out?

  I don’t know, sir.

  I am afraid that the nuances of poetry, of the ancient mariner, did not strike land that day. It is only now that I can venture the thought, setting the mariner aside for a moment, that what we boys saw in that classroom was something Humphries had brought there with him, a personal preoccupation. We talk about taking work home and can fail to see, as an unformed boy might, that, conversely, into everything we do we bring ourselves and, as Zafar might say, our histories. It was, I’m now quite sure, a personal matter for Humphries, and I cannot now know what it
was that made the question of the mariner’s urgency Humphries’s own. The mariner who slays an albatross, thereby bringing calamity upon the crew, is possessed by the spirit of confession. Then I was too young to understand the redemption that comes from giving voice to what the brain seeks to hide from oneself. Only age reveals our drive, our compulsion to say something. Youth has nothing to declare.

  All of which is to say that I think that on the question of why it was that Zafar was talking, even about the circumstances of that last day in Kabul and the events of the final hours, in particular the confrontation with Emily (if confrontation is the right word), the root of any explanation must be that very human urge to speak and tell, the impulse that brings the religious to the confessional box and others to the therapist’s couch; even when the urge to tell has competition, including a drive, for instance, to withhold the self-incriminating; and even though there is a reason why we refer to horrors as unspeakable.

  Is there something you don’t want to say, something you’ve glossed over? You don’t have to tell me, I said.

  As he related the events in Kabul and Islamabad, Zafar had seemed agitated, shifting in his seat, leaning forward, leaning back, a picture of fevered animation. But now a strange calm descended over him. He did not look me in the eye but acquired that faraway look he sometimes had, evidence of a mind considering its memories, perhaps considering what to say, and I felt no urge to breach the silence stretching out over us.

  When I came to the last of Zafar’s numbered notebooks and to the final page of writing, I found two entries. Their juxtaposition was disturbing. Each on its own did not have any great effect, but seeing them obviously written at the same time, next to each other—that was unsettling. They are the first two epigraphs to this chapter.

  Perhaps as much to temper the effect of the first two as for any other reason, I have included two more, the Simone Weil and the Susan Brownmiller, both taken from an earlier notebook. Zafar would have known that in due course I would come to his final entries. I cannot say if that is why he hesitated to talk at the critical moment, why he moved on so quickly to Islamabad and the final meeting with the colonel. Perhaps he knew those entries alone would speak volumes. But in the end he himself did speak, and he did return to that room in Kabul. In fact, he may never have left it.